Author: Mick Hartley

Johann Hari on Darfur (via the DTPWs):

At last, some good news from Darfur: the holocaust in western Sudan is nearly over. There’s only one problem – it’s drawing to an end only because there are no black people left to cleanse or kill.

The National Islamic Front government has culled over 400,000 “Zurga” – a word which translates best as “niggers” – and driven two million more from their homes in its quest to make western Sudan “Zurga-free”. Their racist Janjaweed militias would love to carry on rampaging and raping, but the black villages have all been burned down and the women have all been raped with “Arab seed” to “destroy their race from within” – what’s a poor militiaman to do? The first genocide of the twenty-first century has proceeded without a hitch, and the genocidaires have won.

A momentous breakthrough in human-animal communication: dolphins have been taught to sing the Batman theme tune (via SciTechDaily).

Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song.

The findings, outlined in two studies, are the first time that nonhuman mammals have demonstrated they can recognise rhythms and reproduce them vocally.

Are there no limits to what science can achieve?

For fans of the Colonel, this Metafilter entry is recommended, including as it does a link to some previously unseen (by me at any rate) drawings by the great man.

This is also recommended.

f their country and thus feel that they have a direct stake in the success of “project Iraq.”

Vincent was murdered a couple of months back.

doned any attachment to progress and the future”:

We [at spiked] don’t want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century. It is apparent that project will not be pursued through hanging on to the coat tails of Gordon Brown, or imagining that there is any more of a left-wing vehicle for political change today than there is a right-wing one.

There is a pressing need to rise above all this and debate the need for a new future-oriented idea of human liberation. However, this will not necessitate, as people used to say, ‘breaking the mould’ of left-right politics. That mould has already been shattered beyond repair.

Debating “the need for a new future-oriented idea of human liberation” sounds fine, but what does it mean outside of being standard leftist boilerplate? Much of the old left’s problem was precisely this belief that we (the people, the working class, the proletariat) needed liberating, when it was transparently obvious that the old battles had largely been won and that people in Western liberal democracies didn’t (and don’t) regard themselves as being in any need of liberation by some supposedly far-sighted revolutionary vanguard – especially when the language of liberation was the same language that was being used to justify the far-from-liberatory politics on the other side of the Iron Curtain. We don’t react too well when told that human liberation lies in some distant future that we have to struggle towards. We’re already free, thanks. It may not be utopia, and it could and should get better, and we can discuss how that might happen, but what we don’t need is to be liberated.

Many people do, though. Or did. Like for instance people living under the appalling cruelties of Saddam’s tyranny in Iraq. And they were liberated. By, um, George Bush and Tony Blair. Against the bitter opposition of much of the left.

So yes, the left-right mould has been shattered.

ebts by the defunct state enterprises of Mao’s time. The relatively new stock market, meanwhile, is tiny in relation to the scale of the manufacturing sector. The result is that the allocation of funds for investment and credit is not done on the basis of meaningful competition and relevant information, but through personal connections that maximise returns to a powerful few, rather than general economic efficiency.

Will all the countless new tower blocks in Shanghai’s Pudong district be making money five years from now? I rather doubt it. What about the bizarre office building I saw in Shenyang that is actually the shape of a Chinese coin? Even less likely. Could the real estate bubble that currently dominates conversation in Shanghai and Beijing go pop? You bet. And what would the effects of such a property crash be on the economy as a whole? No one has the foggiest idea.

It may be that the familiar laws of economic development have been abolished by the Chinese Communist Party. It may be that China will be able to sustain this runaway growth without ever suffering a financial crisis of the sort that has periodically interrupted the miracles in other Asian economies. But I am doubtful. […]

I suppose I came to China prepared for the old Communist culture of evasiveness and stonewalling. I encountered the very opposite. People are keen to talk. They are not afraid the way people were in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union. If they are not pressing harder for political change, it is simply because they are too busy trying to make money. But if the money were to dry up – if the dodgy financial system were to crash before the worst of it has been flogged to gullible Western banks…

If such an economic setback were to occur, people’s tolerance of the corruption that is inherent in the “Planned Market Economy” might suddenly diminish. And with the internet and the English language spreading so fast, there are ways to express disenchantment beyond the wildest dreams of the Tiananmen Square generation.

Watch this vast and vital space.

fucian theories.

Citing rising crime rates, unemployment, corruption, a growing wealth gap, the absence of a welfare system, and what he says is a complete lack of a moral or ethical value system, Kang believes China needs to rediscover its cultural roots in order to survive.

“Over the past 150 years China has abandoned its traditional values and has followed a process of Westernisation… a mixture of capitalism and Marxist-Leninism. As a result, there are no moral standards to regulate how people should treat each other, their business partners, their friends and families. We have no way of judging what makes a happy life. Confucius offers traditional values that can help rebuild our moral and social standards.”

Kang’s diagnosis is already gaining influence in high places. For example, proposals for schools to adopt courses in traditional Chinese culture have been given the green light by the Ministry of Education. More than five million children now study Confucian texts and recite ancient poetry.

The precepts of Master Kong (Confucius’ Chinese name) stress ideals of integrity, altruism, respect, and virtue.

Kang however, has much grander plans for the old sage. He has visions of not only the Communist party in China adopting Confucianism as its official ideology, but also the United Nations.

The revival of Confucius mirrors the return of other traditional belief systems and religions such as Taoism and Buddhism. Kang calls it the rise of Chinese cultural hegemony.

government in Pyongyang is attempting to regain control over the distribution of essential supplies that have increasingly been provided by the market and outside donors.

As of yesterday, stall-holders have been ordered to stop trading in cereals, including rice. From now on they can only be sold at controlled prices through the state’s public distribution system.

This is not the only regressive step. In August the government told foreign non-governmental organisations that they must leave by the end of the year. Groups such as the World Food Programme and the Red Cross and Red Crescent – which have fed more than a fifth of the country’s 23 million population and provided two-thirds of essential drugs since the famines of the mid-Nineties – will have to stop providing food and medicine on 1 January.

The controls appear to be an effort to close the gates of economic reform that were opened in 2002 through government relaxation of price controls. […]

Most of the foreign NGO workers have been told they must pack their bags. At first they were told operations could only continue if they switched to development, rather than humanitarian, work and used only North Korean staff. More recently, they were told they could keep one foreigner in Pyongyang. Glyn Ford, an MEP and an expert on North Korea, said such conditions would be unacceptable to the EU, which has provided substantial amounts of aid in the past five years. ‘We insist on monitoring. One member of staff won’t be enough for that,’ he said.

With negotiations continuing, the full impact of the changes is still unclear. The WFP was feeding 6.5 million people at the start of this year. But most NGOs and diplomats say the biggest worry is not food but medicine.

This claim (that medicine, not food, is the biggest worry) is hard to square with some of the other information that’s coming out. Whatever, it spells further disaster for the people of North Korea and has to put a large question mark over any attempts to deal rationally with Kim’s regime.

In the circumstances, it’s worth quoting from the conclusion to Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea“, where he looks at the dismal failure of the various policies of appeasement, from the Clinton-Carter accords of 1994 to the Sunshine policies of South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung (for which he was awarded the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize).

Foremost, North Korea poses a moral question. Between them, Kim Il Sung and his son are responsible for the deaths of over seven million Koreans – three million civilians in the Korean War, and, by some estimates, three million in the famine and at least a million deaths of political prisoners during the last 50 years. After a succession of statesmen – Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Dae Jung, Sweden’s Goran Petersen, Madeleine Albright – have returned home to tell us how rational, well informed, witty, charming, and deeply popular Kim Jong Il is, President Bush’s judgement that Kim is loathsome seems the only honest and truthful one.

, in an article published in the August 8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and titled “Unsupervised Learning of Natural Languages,” the Israelis Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman, two of them physicists, one a computer scientist and one a psychologist, argue otherwise. They have, the four maintain, developed a mathematical model — or as they put it, “an unsupervised algorithm that discovers hierarchical structure in any sequence of data” — that explains how a child, unaided by an innate mental grammar of any kind, can learn languages as diverse as English and Chinese by precisely the trial-and-error method that Chomsky dismissed as insufficient. Moreover, this model, they write, has actually been tested on computers, which, when fed between 10,000 and 120,000 sentences in languages they originally were unfamiliar with — a not enormous quantity considering the number of sentences spoken to an average 3- or 4-year-old every day — were able to decode these languages’ grammatical structure and to produce grammatically acceptable sentences in them.

I must confess that, having tried reading “Unsupervised Learning of Natural Languages,” I lack the mathematics to follow it very far. Moreover, even if the algorithm in question works, it would still have to be demonstrated, in order to refute Chomsky’s theory of “innate grammar,” that such a model, or one like it, is itself innate in the human mind. But for linguists, the possible implications are enormous. An entire era may be about to come to an end — and with it a good part of the reputation of the man most identified with it. It would be poetic justice indeed if the Israel-bashing Chomsky were knocked off his scientific pedestal by a group of scientists from Israel.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the Times:

The Jewish experience challenges the received wisdom about minorities. Jews did not seek multiculturalism. They sought to integrate, adapt and belong. Jewish schools focused on turning Jews into British citizens, at home in the nation’s language, culture and history. Sermons were spiced with quotations from Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. The role model was Sir Moses Montefiore, whom The Times praised on his 100th birthday in 1884 for his “ determination to show, by his life, that fervent Judaism and patriotic citizenship are absolutely consistent with one another”.

Britain was different in those days. It knew who and what it was. It had the quiet confidence of a nation secure in its own identity. It remembered what it is now beginning to forget, that for minorities to integrate there must be something for them to integrate into. Subtly and with a certain grace, Britain reminded Jews that there were rules, things you did and didn’t do. I remember Bertha Leverton, one of the children saved from Germany in 1939, telling of how she was taught, on her first day in England, that it was polite to leave some food uneaten on the side of your plate. She was starving and traumatised, yet the gesture helped to make her feel at home. She appreciated the hidden message: from here on, you are one of us.

Our postmodern culture — moral relativism, multiculturalism, the right to self-esteem — entered into with the highest motives, has by the law of unintended consequences made it almost impossible for minorities to integrate. The result is not more tolerance but less. For the first time in my life, Jews feel uncomfortable in Britain. They have heard public figures making crude gibes about Jews. They have seen Holocaust Memorial Day — dedicated to all victims of man’s inhumanity to man — misrepresented and politicised. Throughout Europe, Jewish students are harassed, synagogues vandalised and cemeteries desecrated.

These things matter not because of the threat they pose to Jews, but because anti-Semitism is always an advance warning of a wider crisis. Today religious groups are in danger of becoming pressure groups instead of thinking what is in the best interests of Britain as a whole. That is not good for some of us: it is bad for all of us.

Hmm – I wonder if he has any particular minority/religious group in mind?

Update: as if to prove Sacks’ point…

Novelty pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office — in case they offend Muslim staff.

Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Bosses acted after a Muslim complained about pig-shaped stress relievers delivered to the council in the run-up to the Islamic festival of Ramadan.

Muslims are barred from eating pork in the Koran and consider pigs unclean.

Councillor Mahbubur Rahman, a practising Muslim, backed the ban. He said: “It’s a tolerance of people’s beliefs.”

Funny how that tolerance is always one way.